Abstract

The benefits of two-handed interaction have been heavily researched and new input devices that presumably better support such interaction are common. Yet the standard desktop setup today continues to be a keyboard and pointing device. Despite its universality, there does not exist a systematic description of two-handed interaction with this setup. Our work fills that gap. We conducted observational studies with 37 design application users focusing on three fundamental elements of two-handed interaction: (1) the configurations hands assume (the different positions the two hands are in relative to the input devices), (2) how much time is spent in each configuration, and (3) how often the hands move between the configurations. We propose a model that describes the patterns of two-handed interaction that occur broadly across all users, for example that every user had a configuration in which s/he spent the majority of his or her time (for most users this was one hand on the left side of the keyboard and one hand on the mouse). We also document where there are individual differences in patterns, namely in how much each hand moves. The three-staged analytic approach we took to arrive at these findings is described, along with implications for design.

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